[ssba]
Billy Elliot The Musical
Reviewed by Myron Meisel
La Mirada Theatre for the Performing Arts
Through Feb. 8
During the notoriously doomed 1984 coal miners’ strike against Maggie Thatcher’s determination to destroy the union and its jobs, motherless 11-year old Billy Elliot (Mitchell Tobin) ditches his 50-pence afterschool boxing classes for ballet lessons, unbeknownst to his picketing father (David Atkinson) and firebrand older brother Tony (Stephen Weston). When his beleaguered but dedicated teacher Mrs. Wilkinson (Vicki Lewis) proposes that Billy audition for the Royal Ballet School, traditional attitudes militate against his participation, until the desperation of the village’s prospects cause the workers to evolve their view toward anyone with a chance of surmounting their otherwise hopeless circumstances.
McCoy Rigby Entertainment and its home base, the La Mirada Theatre for the Performing Arts, deserve credit for mounting their own fresh rendition of the ten Tony Awards-winning musical, based on the 2000 film, as adapted by the movie’s original writer and director. The West End and Broadway success, which ran 3-1/2 years in New York for over 1100 performances, carries substantially more heft than most of its commercial brethren, with its working class milieu and historically downtrodden setting in northeastern England.
Nevertheless, Billy Elliot The Musical, like its source material, uses its political and social consciousness primarily to provide counterpoint for tweaking the most heart-tugging sentiment out of its essentially sweet premise. Even more than the congenial but overrated movie (for all its $110 million gross and 3 Oscar noms), the show feels driven to hit every requisite musical comedy note, even at the expense of fundamental suspension of disbelief. (When Billy can hardly pirouette, he can still deliver an accomplished tap routine.) The urge to please without surcease makes for a long, generous and consistently second-rate entertainment.
Composer Elton John in collaboration with creator Lee Hall has come up with serviceable songs, nothing inspired or memorable, though none awful. Still, the plot remains a sturdy generator of goodwill that powers our empathy through the calculated distractions of the fundamentally forced production numbers, and conceptually the staging boasts good bones. The actors and design elements may not be of a caliber of the original Broadway production, which ironically cost more than three times the movie’s modest $5 million budget to open, but for a homegrown Equity mounting from scratch with a massive ensemble, mightily impressive to fill the stage at the curtain call, this somewhat scrappy effort has more than ample reason to proud of its professionalism.
While it is tough to muster must-see enthusiasm for a more than adequate edition of a more than adequate musical, it does provide a considerable helping of entertainment with some grounding in real life issues and concerns.
I particularly relished the Mitchell Tobin’s Billy at the Sunday matinee. He stepped in seven days before opening night after the originally cast Noah Parets broke his arm in rehearsal. Tobin is 14 and a veteran of both a U.S. and international tour and subsequently of the London edition, which continues to run. He is a mighty trouper, capable of avoiding adolescent acting excesses while taking maximum advantage of every available showbiz stratagem, genuinely winning, though this stage conception cannot allow anyone to approach the delicacy and grace the movie afforded its star Jamie Bell.
Also strong and stalwart, Atkinson as the Dad and Weston as the consciously doomed elder brother, while the reliable Vicki Lewis keeps her ballet-mistress of the sticks acerbically brisk with authentic musical comedy brio, and original Broadway castmember Jamie Torcellini as the endearing if narrow-minded boxing coach.
It would remiss to neglect to mention the giddy pleasures of seeing a fully-manned classic male chorus line successively dancing as billy-clubbed strikebreaking bobbies and then artfully scruffed and dirty miners, with an interposed interlude as white-tied and top-hatted hoofers.
La Mirada Theatre for the Performing Arts, 14900 La Mirada Blvd., La Mirada; Wed.-Thurs., 7:30 p.m.; Fri.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sat-Sun., 2 p.m.; through
Feb. 8. (562) 944-9801 or (714) 994-6310, www.lamiradatheatre.com
